Game Development Discussion: Beige Feedback

[Dryad]

On 7/13/2023 at 6:32 PM, Village said:

Per moderations request, we will also be adding a anti-beige baiting mechanism alongside other changes.

• If you are beiged within x turns of declaring an offensive war, that beige does not apply until x (vote above) turns have passed since your last offensive war declaration.

Imo it's great that you are thinking about doing something about exploits, but this one is akin to letting a couple of cheaters ruin the game for everybody else. Peoples ability to freely declare offensive wars is extremely important. Those who are losing in alliance wars need to do it to fire nukes and missiles and use other guerilla tactics; while pirates who raid with soldiers only can't wait 5 days for their defensives to expire, raiding is their income and they need to be able to both declare wars frequently and escape blockade-holds, otherwise you are making this playstyle MUCH less viable than it already is.

I think at the very least getting beaten in defensive wars must absolutely apply beige immediately, for offensives it's much less clear how problematic this change could be.

If you are absolutely insistent on implementing this I urge you to at least consider some further conditions to check whether players might be warring each other to coordinate beige:

- Does the player getting beiged have a lot of military? If not then most likely this isn't going to be a case of someone exploiting beige to unfairly give someone a beating. You could set x to 0 under the condition that someone has less than 50% of their maximum planes+tanks or something like that.

- If close to no damage has been dealt in a war it becomes much more likely that it's a case of people attacking friends to coordinate beige. Therefore you could set x to 0 if a war exceeds a certain value of damage dealt (which should be somewhat dependent on city count). Loot should not count towards that damage value as it can be returned through trades.

I think blindly implementing this proposal without any check to see if this actually is a case of beige-exploits is going to make the game significantly more frustrating to people who are already on the receiving end and that will be incredibly bad for the game.

Edited July 14, 2023 by Dryad

[Lucianus]

So eehhh, where is the blitz advantage with idea 1 or 2? 

[Village]

Sorry I don't have a more detailed post right now or specific replies for things, we're still going over feedback and sorting out stuff for a bunch of the things. I do want to clarify one thing though. The beige baiting idea is NOT set in stone, I know I didn't convey that well and I'm sorry about that. The fact that moderation is seeing an uptick in exploity cases and wants something to address beige baiting/slot filling in the expoity manner is non-negotiable, but the exact implementation of that is something that we have complete control over. I'm personally not the biggest fan of the current system either, but out of the options we had come up with it was the one we decided to go with. If you guys have better options we're all ears and I've got no issue making another post addressing that stuff in particular and possibly moving forward with a completely new idea or using this one with tweaks or conditions.

[Dr Rush]

1 hour ago, Village said:

Sorry I don't have a more detailed post right now or specific replies for things, we're still going over feedback and sorting out stuff for a bunch of the things. I do want to clarify one thing though. The beige baiting idea is NOT set in stone, I know I didn't convey that well and I'm sorry about that. The fact that moderation is seeing an uptick in exploity cases and wants something to address beige baiting/slot filling in the expoity manner is non-negotiable, but the exact implementation of that is something that we have complete control over. I'm personally not the biggest fan of the current system either, but out of the options we had come up with it was the one we decided to go with. If you guys have better options we're all ears and I've got no issue making another post addressing that stuff in particular and possibly moving forward with a completely new idea or using this one with tweaks or conditions.

Okay some further clarification. While there has been a a surge of cases recently, this has been a problem with biege for a very long time now and has always trended upwards. It has over the last two years reached the point of essentially being meta for the losing side in a global to suicide into people hoping for biege. Because it was happening so much moderation caved a bit with the 'do damage ruling.' A continuation of the years long battle between the actual intent of the rules and the mechanical contradictions of the war system. Frankly speaking this has been a long time coming and now while the war system is already being decheesed is good a time to deal with it. 

Ultimately mechanics are king and no amount of Deus Admin will offset literal invulnerability as a mechanic. 

[Sam Cooper]

4 hours ago, Dr Rush said:

Okay some further clarification. While there has been a a surge of cases recently, this has been a problem with biege for a very long time now and has always trended upwards. It has over the last two years reached the point of essentially being meta for the losing side in a global to suicide into people hoping for biege. Because it was happening so much moderation caved a bit with the 'do damage ruling.' A continuation of the years long battle between the actual intent of the rules and the mechanical contradictions of the war system. Frankly speaking this has been a long time coming and now while the war system is already being decheesed is good a time to deal with it. 

Ultimately mechanics are king and no amount of Deus Admin will offset literal invulnerability as a mechanic. 

But are you really dealing with a problem if you are just replacing it with another one and arguably a bigger one that will affect a much larger number of players?
This problem as you already understand is simply driven by the game mechanics and the other changes that have been proposed will hopefully give players better alternatives than to seek beige through 'unfair' means. You have already fixed most of this problem in idea 1 by not giving much beige in offensive defeats, I believe that's the idea that will go through since #2 has major issues. I don't see why you need another policy on top of that specifically to guarantee a time period for alliances to counter raids, what justification do you have for this generosity?

Why do we even have this fundamentally flawed half baked policy thrown on the table with a 'deal with it' attitude without even a council discussion like we had for other issues?

Without a doubt you understand the problem but you definitely do not understand the implications of the proposed solution, read what dryad and doom have said already, wars are fought very differently on an individual level it is extremely important to time your war declarations right or you can run into issues like having 12 MAPs but no units left to use them with or not being able to make deposits for multiple rounds, this essentially turns raiding upside down making it unviable to just to make things a little more convenient for moderation and give undue benefits to other players.
I can talk more about it but this should have ideally been done in a council thread, I am extremely disappointed I have to speak about it when it is already on the table and only question I am asked is how long do I want to give people to counter me for every raid.

9 hours ago, Village said:

I'm personally not the biggest fan of the current system either, but out of the options we had come up with it was the one we decided to go with.

It is very concerning to hear this was the best solution that was picked and I can only imagine what the other proposals would have been, you might want to consider including people who fight wars more often and under different conditions (not just large scale alliance wars) in the discussions.

[whiskerz]

Suiciding into a larger nation in an effort to bring them into range of more of your alliance for a counter attack has always been a thing here. It is a common technique for destroying planes and ships. bringing a larger nation down in score.  In the 10-25 city range it is common. Is there some whining over this ? 

[Avatar Patrick]

On 7/14/2023 at 10:47 AM, Zei-Sakura Alsainn said:

It's especially funny because I haven't been involved in a global in like 18 months

Are you sure about that? 😛 https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=1706627